Deep beneath the sea thrives a massive mining industry that extracts cobalt, sulfides and polymetallic nodules (layers of iron and manganese hydroxides) from thousands of metres under the ocean. Now a group of researchers got together to understand the impact of mining projects on marine life .

In the latest edition of Nature , they reported their findings of before and after scenarios of a large-scale test of commercial deep sea machine mining on the abyssal plain of the eastern Pacific Ocean. The depth of mining was 4,280 m beneath the sea, and the project recover over 3,000 tonnes of polymetallic nodules.

The scientists created a species-level sediment-dwelling macrofaunal dataset to assess fauna and biodiversity for two years before and two months after test mining. They found

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